Checksum Arcanius

Yesterday after dropping Alice off at the airport, I cam back via 405 and stopped at Fry’s, where I picked up a couple of 750gb Seagate SATA hard drives for $230 each plus tax. Last night, I stayed up late installing the drives and a controller I also purchased into my former roommate Dan’s computer. Everything went smoothly, until I tried installing FreeNAS and the computer wouldn’t boot. So instead, I installed Ubuntu and followed this guide to setting up software RAID 1 on the two drives. This will provide me with about 750,000,000,000 bytes of redundant storage in an always-on configuration. Unfortunately, Dan’s computer is not very quiet, so probably the next step in this process is going to be getting a nice, quiet computer case and a motherboard with a built in SATA controller (or PCI express) so that the full speed of these drives can be unleashed. The step after that involves probably another couple of 750gb disks and perhaps an Infrant ReadyNAS or a Buffalo TeraStation. Fortunately, 750gb will give me plenty of time to figure out what I’m going to do next.

What I’m really excited for, however, is the possibility of using ZFS on a NAS at some point in the future.

A few weeks ago, while de-dusting my desktop computer case, I managed to snap off a plastic clip on my processor heat sink. I was a bit bummed at the time, but the computer seemed to work afterwards, so I didn’t feel too bad. But the computer also started acting flakier than normal. I began getting suspicious and doing some investigating by downloading tools from the ASUS website (my desktop features an ASUS P4P800 Motherboard). The tools let me monitor the temperature of the processor, which I found to be hovering around the scorching 87 degree Celsius mark, occasionally spiking higher during intensive CPU usage. Well, this sounded ridiculously warm to me, and although further investigation taught me that the normal temperature range during load went as high as 75 degrees for my P4 2.8 GHz processor, 87 still seemed excessive. So, corrective action was required.

I talked to Dan and today he was kind enough to give me some thermal grease and some fans and heatsinsk to try. Right now, my box sits open with a new grease job and its original fan and heatsink (still the best fit despite the many possibilities in the box from Dan), and the termperature is holding steady at 46-47 degrees Celcius with mild load.

Unfortunately, the clip is still broken and I don’t know if I can trust the machine to the borken clip’s hands once again. Of course, even the broken clip might provide more force than gavity, which is all that is holding the heat sink on now. At any rate, it will be an adventure.

In the meantime, I am copying the contents of my late laptop Kleinoscope’s hard drive using a slick laptop enclosure lent to me by, once again, Dan. Ten gigs and 34,722 files in and still going strong.

As part of my CREE Traineeship, I am in Long Beach, California, for the 34th Annual Meeting and Exposition of the Controlled Release Society. I’m not too interested in controlled release myself, but I came here for the location and the people. We got in last night a little past 10 after a slightly delayed flight, then we took a shuttle to our hotel before wandering around the waterfront for several hours, returning at around 2:00am. The night was nice and mild; this also means that there were many homeless people out and about or sleeping. We weren’t harassed too much though. Despite our wanderings, we didn’t find the beach (we happened to head the wrong way along the shore; my fault), so along with checking into the conference, I think we will try to find the beach today.

The hotel we are staying at doesn’t have any wireless, so this morning I went to the local Radio Shack and picked up a MIMO Wireless-G router. I’ve been without an extra router for a while, so I think it was a worthwhile purchase even without the current need. Plus now I can blog from anywhere in the hotel complex, and everyone around has access too, since I don’t implement WEP or WPA.

Now its time to shower after my morning job to Radio Shack and then head to the convention center.

Today was the first day of summer classes. It was also the first day of trying out my last-minute schedule change. I started the day out at work, leaving at noon to head to school. However, I left my house keys at work, so I had to rely on my roommate Doug to get back into the house. Fortunately, I have an extra room key in my backpack, so I still had access to my room. That would soon change.

I left again to go to my 4:30 Capstone class, which went well enough although Christine didn’t show and has decided to drop the class because she enjoys her CREE activities more than she anticipates enjoying her Capstone activities. Then Dennis treated me and Teresa to dinner before I headed back home. Good thing too, because once again I was locked out, but this time I had to wait for Enpei to get back, about an hour later, to get into the house. I spent the time reading a journal article for my CREE project and catching some accidental sleep.

Not long after this, Hoyin came over to pick up a network cable, and I ended up dropping him off at his new condo on First Hill to avoid wallowing in deep thought about the way things might have been. After dropping Hoyin off and checking out his new pad, I decided to scurry on over to Bellevue to pick up the just-delivered new laptop of wonderfulness from my Mom’s office where it was delivered. More on the laptop (a Dell Latitude D630) another day.

Returning home, I let myself in to the house with just-departed roommate Daniel’s old key. Unfortunately, I had failed to bring along the extra room key, which was still in my backpack, locked securely inside the room. I tried carding the door and forcing it open without breaking anything with no success. Enlisting Enpei’s help yet again, we were about to climb up on his megavan to attempt to gain access to my room, but then I spotted a ladder. Finally, I climbed into the thankfully cracked open second story window to my room while Enpei stabilized the ladder below me.

So, there is a happy ending, to this day at least. Now I get to wish again for a happy ending to some other chapters of my life.

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. My laptop, I am sad to report, has officially given up the ghost. Those of you familiar with Kleinoscope probably know that I have already performed surgery on it several times to replace a broken power plug:

Also, the keyboard’s enter key got stuck down, and in my attempts to fix that I broke it, so it kinda flops around and occasionally falls off these days. One battery is dead and the second is close. Most recently, a little bit of dripped water took out the touchpad and started causing instant lockups when moderate pressure was applied to the touchpad area. To add to the excitement, the front panel lights were all cross-wired, so the power light was always on, the hard drive light acted a lot like the power light, and the power light sometimes turned a hue I had never seen before.

So, I decided it was time for surgery again. To the tune of Sportcenter, I pulled out my tools and got to work. I had never opened up the touchpad area of the laptop before, and it was quite interesting. I found an area on the touchpad controller board where some water damage had occurred and attempted to fix it several times. Each time, the problem was not fixed until, finally, the laptop stopped turning on at all. At that point, with laptop disassembled, touchpad gone, enter key dead, batteries low, and wits at end, I decided that it was time for a new laptop.

So now I will ask all of you who dare read this far, for advice on what laptop I should get. My main criteria are:

– Portability. It doesn’t necessarily have to be ultraportable, but I am not going down the 8-pound behemoth desktop replacement pathway again. I guess I would aim for around 4 pounds ideally.
– Battery life. Kleinoscope was a P4. Without the M designation. That means it put out more heat than a toaster oven and drained batteries about as fast as a short circuit. I was not appreciative.
– Ruggedness. I treat my stuff fairly hard sometimes, and I appreciate it when it can keep up.
– Bug-free-ness. My last laptop often had trouble waking up from sleep when plugged in to power. Stuff like that is crap.

Ideally, the laptop would lose the optical drive for more battery space. I don’t mind an external optical drive. I realize this is unlikely to find in anything that’s not imported from Japan. I think I would still prefer XP over Vista at this point. I don’t need gizmos like a camera, but built-in wifi is almost a requirement. I guess that’s all. Thanks in advance for your input.

I guess this is why Gmail is still Beta… I just got this and a few of my friends have as well, and we definitely have not been doing any weird stuff with our Gmail accounts… anyone else running into this recently?

Gmail by Google

Lockdown in sector 6!

Our system indicates unusual usage of your account. In order to protect Gmail users from potentially harmful use of Gmail, this account has been disabled for up to 24 hours.
This is likely due to the use of a third party software tool with Gmail.

If you are using any third party software that interacts with your Gmail account, please disable it or adjust it so that its use complies with the Gmail Terms of Use. If you feel that you have been using your Gmail account according to the Terms of Use or otherwise normally, please contact us.

A little more than three years after getting my first cell phone, the time has come to re-evaluate phones and plans. Currently, my family shares a Cingular/AT&T/Cingular/AT&T/Whatever family plan. We have been fairly happy with it, but our phones are all starting to give up the ghost (my second phone to do so, really). Since we are under no contractual obligations, and thanks to the ability to keep our numbers wherever we go, we are open to the idea of changing carriers as well as phones.

Here are the criteria:

– I like flip-phones
– We have no camera or gadgetry requirements, they may even be minuses
– I like the possibility of getting internet via phone
– I might add more as I think of it…

From very early research, I’m leaning towards T-Mobile. Your input is appreciated!